adult life is spent without one s own children in the household, and the rise in marital formation at older ages, including re-marriage, means that many families form with no intention of producing children . Moreover, increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or taken on a different meaning.changes have come about as what is produced in the home has been dramatically altered both by the emergence of labor-saving technology in the home and by the development of service industries that allow much of what was once provided by specialized homemakers to be purchased in the market. The availability of birth control and abortion has affected the potential consequences of sex both in and out of marriage, while changes in divorce laws have altered the terms of the marital bargain. These forces also have important feedback effects, changing the pool of marriageable singles across the age distribution, thereby affecting search, marriage, remarriage, and the extent of «churning» in the marriage market [10, p. 347]. And economic factors strongly influence the marriage market. Marriage rates rose during, and in the wake of, the two World Wars and fell during the Great Depression. The divorce rate fell during the Depression and spiked following World War II.since the 1960s appear to reflect more subtle influences, and have been the focus of heated political debate as the heyday of marriage gave way to rapid social change. Divorce rates rose sharply, doubling between the mid - 1960s and the mid - 1970s. During this period, family life was potentially altered by many factors: the rise of the women s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, the Supreme Court s granting of marriage as a «fundamental» right under the US [18, p. 215].
Constitution and thus the abolition of laws restricting marriage between races, the elimination in many states of fault-based divorce, and a sharp rise in women s labor force participation. Yet when viewed over the longer time period, we see that while the 1970s had exceptionally high divorce rates, the low divorce rates in previous decades were also somewhat exceptional. Fitting a simple line to the divorce rate between 1860 and 1945 (excluding the post-World War II surge in divorce), suggests that some of the run-up in divorce in the latter third of the 20th century reflects the divorce rate reverting to levels consistent with earlier trends, following unusually low divorce in the 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, based on extrapolation, family scholars as early as the turn of the last century had predicted future divorce rates like those actually witnessed in the 1980s. While the 1970s overshot the trend, the subsequent fall in divorce has put the divorce rate back on the trend-line and by 2005 the annual divorce rate projected by the pre - 1946 trend is quite close to actual divorce rates.divorce rate per thousand people actually peaked in 1981, and has been declining over the ensuing quarter century. The divorce rate in 2005 - 3.6 divorces per thousand people - is at its lowest level since 1970. The number of people entering marriage, as a proportion of the population, in the US has also been falling for the past 25 years, and the marriage rate is currently at its lowest point in recorded history [10, p. 572]. Rates rose as the divorce rate rose, but reached an earlier peak in 1972. Yet even when measuring the num...
